Keeping in touch
Whether to keep answering.
The words enabling and abandoning are both left out of this page. One is used to accuse people of kindness and the other to accuse them of surviving.
This site will not decide it
Not in either direction. Whether you keep answering is yours, because you are the one who lives in what comes afterwards — including a funeral, if it comes to that, where you will be standing next to people who have opinions about what you should have done.
What is on offer here is a clearer look at what you are actually choosing between, and the removal of two words that ruin the thinking: enabling, which is used to accuse people of kindness, and abandoning, which is used to accuse people of surviving.
Questions that help more than a rule
- What is contact costing at the moment? Not in feelings. In hours, sleep, work, and your own household’s patience.
- What does it produce? Sometimes: he is less alone and occasionally he does something because of it. Sometimes: nothing, and you are the audience for a performance.
- Is there a smaller version? Most people think in all-or-nothing terms when the realistic options are narrower — daytime only, messages rather than calls, once a week, no money, not while drunk.
- Could you say your position out loud? If it cannot be said to him plainly, it is usually not a decision yet.
Stopping for a while is not a verdict
You can take a month. You can stop answering after ten at night. You can go on holiday while he is still drinking and not check your phone at the airport. None of that is a judgement on him, and none of it is a failure of loyalty.
Equally, staying in touch through years of it is not weakness and not a character flaw. There is a fashion for treating distance as the mature option, and it does not fit every friendship, particularly not the old ones.
What people regret is not usually the choice. It is making it silently, in one bad week, and never telling him — so that from his side somebody simply vanished.
If you do step back, say so
One short, sober message. What you are doing, that it is not a punishment, and what remains true. Something like: I am not going to take late-night calls any more, I am not going anywhere, ring me at the weekend.
Then hold it without argument. Explaining it repeatedly turns it into a negotiation, and a negotiation at midnight is one you will lose.
If he cuts you off
It happens, usually after he has told you the truth, and it is generally about shame rather than about you. Being known is unbearable to some people while they are still drinking.
You are allowed to leave the door open without standing in it. One message saying you are around if he wants you, and then no campaign. Repeated attempts to reach somebody who has withdrawn tend to make the shame heavier rather than the door wider.